A Must Visit Fort in India – The Mehrangarh

The fort of Mehrangrah, one of the biggest and most famous forts in India, was built in the reign of Rao Jodha who founded the city of jodhpur in 15th century. Since then it has seen countless battles and had stood its ground to protect inhabitants from plunderers. Today this fort is an integral part in life of the people of Jodhpur. It is regarded a sentinel standing at the top of Bhaurcheeria hill for protection of the city and is a symbol of bravery for the people of this region. That’s why they worship and revere this fort.

The above photo is a single shot HDR taken on a cloudy day in winters. I wanted to depict the grandeur of this fort and the details of stonework which makes it so remarkable. In such scenarios one thing that you just wouldn’t like to compromise with is the sharpness of the image. The photo has to be as much sharp as possible with everything in focus. This plainly means shooting with a small lens aperture or higher F value setting to have large depth of field.

Still you may not want to keep lens aperture to smallest as beyond a certain F value sharpness starts decreasing again. I try to keep my settings in such situation near F/10 with variation of one stop on either side.

The other most important thing is ensuring low ISO setting to restrict noise to a minimum level. Low ISO setting ensures that you don’t get grains in your photo even after heavy post processing. I tend to keep the ISO value at 100 and push it upwards only if there is no other way to get right exposure.

Now having set aperture and ISO, you should pin down the right shutter speed which I usually prefer to do through shutter priority mode. I put my camera on shutter priority mode where it intelligently adjusts the shutter speed to find perfect exposure. Sometimes you may not like to have a perfect exposure ! (under-expose or over expose images can look cool too!). In that case go for manual mode where you can have control over shutter speed as well.

The photo was shot in raw format which allows you to apply corrections in a non destructive way. Using a digital image processing software details were pushed to bring out texture of the stonework and to apply color toning to give a warm and vintage look.